Three years ago, I began a national campaign for academic freedom designed to promote the restoration of academic standards, including intellectual diversity, in institutions of higher learning. I did so having visited more than three hundred campuses in the previous fifteen years and having interviewed several thousand students during these visits. In the course of these visits, I came to be familiar with the massive corruption of the academic enterprise that had occurred since I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, which had transformed large segments of the liberal arts schools into political parties of the academic left. This corruption was the result of a determined campaign by Gramscian radicals to use the universities as a platform for their “transformative” agendas of radical social change. In pursuit of their goals, they had created entire academic departments and fields, while subverting others in order to institute programs of study that were ideological rather than scholarly in content and design. To further these goals, they had instituted a system of intolerance (“political correctness”) to de-legitimize alternative intellectual paradigms and ideas, and had put in place the largest and most effective blacklist in the history of the country, whose purpose was to rid faculties of independent-minded professors, who might interfere with their designs.

By the time I made my university rounds, the refusal to hire conservative academics had led to a vanishing presence of conservative faculty members in many liberal arts disciplines. In the fields of sociology and anthropology, for example, the ratio of leftwing professors to conservatives was now approximately thirty-to-one. These two fields themselves had been largely transformed into exercises in leftwing ideology and bore little resemblance to scholarly inquiry. In these fields particularly, but in many others that still bore some resemblance to traditional academic pursuits there was a disturbing absence in university courses of assigned texts that did not validate or amplify with the professor’s ideological point of view. The net effect was to deny students access to alternative – and particularly -- conservative ideas that would challenge the course assumptions. The curriculum was thus transformed into a program of indoctrination.

The active suppression of conservative ideas extended to extra-curricular speaking and activities programs which supported almost exclusively leftwing viewpoints, and to required freshman reading programs, which assigned only leftwing texts, and to supplemental course offerings – the “house” program at Duke University is a striking example -- where professors voluntarily provided students with training sessions in Marxism and other radical creeds under the guise of enriching their academic “education.”

Another form of ideological suppression conducted by faculty ideologues was the abusive treatment of conservative ideas and conservative students in the classroom itself. A not untypical example of such behavior was reported by Penn State student Kelly Keehan in testimony submitted to the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education. This Committee conducted a series of hearings from September 2005 through June 2006 on the state of academic freedom in Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities:

“I’m taking a Women Studies class because I thought it’d be a good class to take. Yesterday I was in class and people were giving presentations about women’s issues and one group decided to do abortion.The next thing I know, we’re spending the whole period learning about how abortion should be completely legal and that it’s a good thing for society to abort babies and that people need to learn how to say the word “abortion” because women should be proud of the fact that they’ve had one.The professor made us start chanting “abortion, abortion,” and to be honest, I started to cry. There was no place in that class for my pro-life opinion.”[2]

When this and hundreds of similar cases were brought to light, far from generating an appropriate concern among academic authorities, the disclosure inspired a torrent of abuse from faculty spokesmen. These spokesmen were affiliated with the American Association of University Professors and assorted professional groups, all of which were firmly in control of the political left. The organizations dencounced the academic freedom hearings in Pennsylvania as a “McCarthy witch-hunt.” AAUP member Ellen Schrecker even wrote a feature article for The Chronicle of Higher Education calling this author and other proponents of intellectual diversity and educational reform “Worse Than McCarthy.”[3] Students who complained about abusive treatment were referred to as snitches and compared to Mao’s “red guards” who had harassed teachers during China’s “Cultural Revolution.” Student testimonies similar to Kelly Keehan’s were challenged as “merely anecdotal” and the veracity of those who reported them were put under a cloud of suspicion.[4]

The claims themselves– that leftists dominated the liberal arts curriculum, that conservatives were discriminated against because they were conservative -- were obvious and really needed no substantiation to anyone familiar with a university campus. Yet the claims were denied and those who raised them discredited, and only a handful of honorable exceptions stepped forward to challenge the denials. One of these is Alan Wolfe, a well-known academic liberal who recently wrote in The New York Times, “I’ve taught in at least two universities known for their leftism, and I know full well that those who teach at them strenuously oppose hiring conservatives and treat students who venerate the military, for example, as misguided…Left-wing domination of academia is an obvious fact…”[5]

The campaign of stone-walling and vituperation with which the academic left greeted the academic freedom campaign forced its supporters to research questions whose answers should have been self-evident. The irony was that these defensive tactics produced, along with the documentation, a far greater exposure of the problems themselves.

The academic freedom campaign had begun with a simple observation – that conservative professors were a dwindling presence on liberal arts faculties. Academics who described their politics as “liberal” could have been expected to show some concern about this threat to academic pluralism and to offer constructive proposals as to how to remedy it. After all, liberals are sponsors of the idea that intellectual pluralism is central to a democratic education. Instead, the academic community turned met this fact with denial. As Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado told me in the fall of 2003 when I raised the issue, “we have no problem here.”

Since not even the obvious was going to be conceded, we devised a study whose purpose was to establish a prima facie case for our claim. We conducted a study of faculty members at 32 elite universities using party registrations to demonstrate that there was indeed an overwhelming disparity in the presence of Democrat-affiliated professors to Republicans in academic classrooms. We conceded at the outset that the methodology was not sophisticated, but it served our purpose of raising the issue.

The response of the academic left, however, was to dig in its heels, dismissing our results and claiming – falsely – that we wanted universities to hire professors based on their party registrations. This resistance – again to the obvious -- triggered a new round of studies, this time by social scientists using sophisticated methodologies to analyze the data. The studies by Daniel Klein, Stanley Rothman Robert Lichter and others confirmed our results, while indicating that the situation was probably even worse than we had described.[6]

Since the disparity of perspectives among university faculty could no longer be reasonably denied, the opposition resorted to a second line of defense. They argued first that the disparity didn’t really matter and, second, that it was not caused by political discrimination but by the fact that conservatives were greedy, religious and dumb, and either failed to seek academic jobs or were not qualified to be hired for them.[7]

This little history provides a necessary introduction to the series of studies of indoctrination in the academic curriculum that follows. It is a well-known principle of group psychology holds that when a room is filled with like-minded people the center of the room tends to move towards the extreme. This has been the case in university liberal arts departments for nearly thirty years. Without an in-house check on faculty zealots, the intellectual dialogue that should be the focus of a liberal arts curriculum has been steadily transformed in many academic departments into a narrowly conceived program of ideological indoctrination. Extremism has flourished to such a degree in the academic greenhouse that we now have an association of “Scholars for Truth” who are dedicated to the proposition that Dick Cheney blew up the World Trade Center on 9/11.

In launching the effort to address the problem of curricular indoctrination, I am again forced to rely on a methodology that is far from ideal. But once again this exercise serves the purpose of making a prima facie case. I am confident that fair-minded readers of this series will see that extensive ideological indoctrination is taking place in university classrooms across the country and at every institutional level.

The methodology that we have used is limited by the resources available to us. Specifically it is dictated by the lack of access that is available to us as university outsiders and personae non grata as a consequence of our previous efforts.In these circumstances we were unable to interview faculty or access some reading lists and syllabi. In other words, we were restricted in our research to faculty-provided course descriptions, syllabi and reading lists that are available to the general public. Fortunately, this source provided sufficient data to make the case.

In these studies, we have made no attempt to be comprehensive, identifying every course that qualifies as ideological indoctrination. Our intent was to demonstrate the existence of a significant problem, which should be a matter of concern to every member of the academic community who cares about the integrity of our educational system and the future of our democracy.

It is my hope that the publication of these studies will stimulate other researchers, who will pursue these issues with better resources at their command.

The academic standard we have adopted to measure what is an appropriate curriculum is provided in a classic statement by the longtime president of the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Gordon Sproul. This clause was inserted into the Berkeley academic freedom code in 1934 and remained there for 70 years until it was removed by radicals in the Berkeley Faculty Senate in July 2003:[8]

The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts….Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.

1. Indoctrination at UC Boulder

The scandal surrounding the former chairman of UC Boulder’s Ethnic Studies Department, Ward Churchill, has highlighted the problems of political agendas in the UC curriculum, but it has certainly not exhausted them. There are, in fact, a disturbing number of courses offered by the University that are neither academic nor scholarly but are frankly ideological and whose clear purpose is to the indoctrination of students in sectarian views of the world. This is an intellectual program that is inappropriate for a public educational institution and violates the fundamental principles of academic freedom to which the university community is pledged. The courses examined in the following text are an indicative sample and by no means exhaustive.

To begin with an illustrative case, Sociology 5055 – “Modern Marxist Theory” is course that clearly violates basic guidelines for any academic curriculum worthy of the name. An academic course devoted to a sectarian theory like Marxism would presumably teach about its origins, history and texts, and examine the arguments of critics. An academic course on “modern Marxist theory” might also be expected to confront the question of how a doctrine which appears to have been so discredited by the collapse of so many societies based on its doctrines could continue to find adherents. But, as is evident from its own course description, Sociology 5055 is not intended as an academic course in Marxism and does not propose to follow a scholarly approach to Marxism or the questions it provokes. Here is the entry in the university catalogue:

This seminar is designed to give students the ability to apply Marx’s theoretical and methodological insights to the study of current topics of theoretical and political importance. Specifically, we will focus on historical materialism's object of study, causality and patterns of determination; the limits of methodological individualism; the relationship between structure and agency; nature as a material limiting factor; the social significance of space and time, and the postmodern agenda. The substantive topics we will explore to illustrate the relevance of Marxist theory are the following: Class, gender, and race/ethnic inequality; population growth/limits to growth; the changing nature and significance of work; information technology and inequality, and democracy, markets and the underdevelopment of development. (Emphasis added.)

This course does not ask whether Marx’s theoretical insights are valid or whether they have any application to current topics of theoretical and political importance, as an academic inquiry normally would. Instead, it asserts or assumes these highly controversial claims, as though Marxism were Newtonian physics, and defines its agenda as instructing students in how to apply Marxist doctrines to the contemporary world. There is not a single text listed in the bibliography of this course that appears to be critical of Marxism. No prominent critics of Marxist theory or practice, such as Kolakowski, von Mises, Sowell, Malia, Pipes – cited in its reading lists. It is self-evidently a course to indoctrinate students in a Marxist view of the world and to amplify the Marx’s original paradigm by incorporating views of gender and race that fit its intellectual model. There is no justification for a course such as this in a public university or in any university that subscribes to modern academic standards. This is a course appropriate to a denominational school whose religious doctrine is Marxism.

Since professors do not have the authority to invent courses and insert them in the curriculum without departmental approval, the adoption of this course into the sociology curriculum indicates a wider problem in the Sociology Department at UC. Further inspection bears this out.

This seminar is designed to examine the materialist feminist challenge to postmodern feminist theorizing, tracing the development of materialist and marxist feminist theory, contrasting their assumptions and political implications with those of postmodern feminism, and comparing their relative contributions to the understanding of the connections between class, gender and race and the contradictory implications of identity politics in the context of the global economy.

This is self-evidently a course to indoctrinate students in “materialist and Marxist feminist theory.” It is not an academic course that examines this theory in a scholarly way using the critical methods of an academic discipline, which are the methods of science rather than what the philosopher Charles Pierce referred to as the “method of authority.”

Sociology 5006 is not education that conforms to academic standards or the principles of academic freedom.

Nor is Sociology 5006 the only course of its kind in the Boulder Sociology Department:

feminist Theory

Sociology 5036

Professor AnnJanette Rosqa

Course Description:

Rather than attempting a representative sampling or making any pretense to comprehensiveness, this course will focus primarily on feminist theories that are generally categorized as “poststructuralist,” and will endeavor to ensure that students acquire sufficient vocabulary and familiarity with key texts to understand and work with these theories. Among other things, this means that the course will prioritize a reckoning with the epistemological ramifications of poststructuralist feminist theory: how do writings that fall within this loosely bounded arena impact the kinds of questions we might ask in social research? What “moves” do they enable us to make in our study of social phenomena? What are the assumptions made by these theories and how might they affect what we think we know about the social world, how we “know” it, and what any of us think we’re up to when we set out to “study” it?

This is obviously a course to teach students post-structuralist feminism not to teach them to examine the subject in an academic way. Having first been indoctrinated in the theory, the students are then asked to apply it to interpret the social universe:

During the second half of the term, we’ll set out to explore specific applications of feminist poststructuralist theory. The course will focus particularly on the ramifications of these theories – theories that arise out of, and analyze, the experience of living in and through the mediations of “marked” categories (woman, queer, [post]colonial) – for the study of lives lived in/through/via “unmarked” experiences and institutions. Put another way, the course will ask: of what use are poststructuralist feminist, queer, and/or postcolonial theories for the analysis of topics that are not primarily identified in terms of their connection to “oppressed” groups? To this end, we will examine feminist theories of masculinity, heteronormativity, “white”-ness, the state, nation and empire.

The scope of this course is breathtaking, encompassing the theory not only of gender, but of the state, the nation and empire. Professor Rosqa has a degree in the “History of Consciousness and Cultural Anthropology” and has no professional expertise in the theory of the modern nation-state or economic empire or racial categories like “white-ness.” The subject matter of the course is impossibly broad (and therefore not within the professor’s expertise) because the universe explored is ideological not academic or professional.

GRADUATE FEMINIST METHODS Sociology 5026-001

Professor Joanne Belknap

Course Ideology

This graduate seminar is an overview on feminist research methods, focusing on the discipline of sociology, but also addressing some other disciplines in far more limited means.

Teaching Ideology

My goal is to have students leave the course with a strong knowledge base in feminist research methods.

The course is frankly announced as a training in the methods of a sectarian ideology.

SEX AND GENDER IN SOCIETY

Sociology 1016

Instructor: Jadi Morrow

Course Description:

Many sociologists agree that gender is mainly constructed during socialization as a child through the various socializing institutions (family, school, religion, the media). We will examine these socializing agents. Then we will look at how the meanings that we give to gender (and sex) in this country have different effects for men and women. We will end the course by looking forward individually, examining possibilities for social change,…

The texts assigned for this course exclusively take the view that gender is not biologically determined but is a product of ideological forces in society (“socially constructed”).This is one point of view, which would legitimately be examined in a course on “Sex and Gender in Society.” But in this course it is the only point of view.

Like Professor Gimenez’s courses, Sociology 1016 is designed to indoctrinate students in a sectarian theory of gender and society, rather than to conduct an academic examination of these subjects. As a required course, Sociology 1016 is taught in many sections. Alison Hatch is instructor in one of these sections. In the course catalogue she informs students that she too will teach “Sex and Gender in Society” exclusively from one point of view – that “gender roles are learned behaviors (not biological).” This is also a program of indoctrination. It is not academic and not scholarly, and violates the academic freedom of Colorado students:

Course Description & Organization:

This class is taught from the perspective that gender and gender roles are learned behaviors (not biological) that are socially-constructed by culture (not innate) and contextually specific and malleable (not universal or fixed).

A third section of Sociology 1016 is taught by Dr. Elaine Enarson, who also explains in the catalogue description that her course is taught from an ideological and sectarian point of view:

Course process and structure:

I teach from a feminist perspective, by which I mean…that knowledge of how gender relations are constructed, maintained and challenged can be empowering.

A fourth section of Sociology 1016 is taught by Adam Morenberg, whose agenda is to each his students “feminist consciousness” – in other words, not how to think but what to think.

Course overview:

This course is an introduction to sociological and feminist study of gender in contemporary U.S. society. Our work will focus on the social construction of gender, privilege and difference; social institutions and gender; gendered intimacies and gendered bodies. We will identify patterns of gender oppression and privilege, and we will discuss possible responses to social inequality….

With a “feminist consciousness,” we take our gender consciousness and look for ways that gender differences grant or deny power….With a gender consciousness, we note differences; with a feminist consciousness we see what difference those differences make. The point of this class is not to convince you to be a feminist. Rather, I want you to understand sociological feminist thought; it is your decision whether you adopt a feminist consciousness as your own.

The caveat at the end of this course is disingenuous. In the first place the course, as described by the instructor, is a course in how to look at the world with a feminist consciousness. It is not an academic examination of feminist consciousness but a training in feminist consciousness. Any decision the student made to accept or reject feminism would necessarily have to take place outside the curriculum, since no provision is made for a critical analysis of feminism within the curriculum. Imagine a comparable course designed to teach students how to think as a racist or as a monarchist, with the caveat that having been trained to think this way, and graded on their ability to do so, students would be able to decide for themselves whether to continue thinking as a racist or a monarchist after completing the course. Similar courses could be taught in how to think as a Republican or a Democrat, or as an Islamic jihadist for that matter.

SOCIAL CONFLICT AND SOCIAL VALUESSociology 1005

Instructor Brett Johnson

As described on the class website, this is a course in left-wing politics. It is not about understanding “the discipline of sociology as the author claims. Brett Johnson is the author with other Colorado University instructors of The Better World Handbook, which is a required text for the course, and is a guide to “progressive” political action.

Purpose:

·To understand the influence that society has upon us and to realize our power to shape society with our every action.

·To embrace the world with passion and determination and have an intense desire to make a contribution to the world.

·To become citizens that promote the creation of a just and ecologically sustainable world.

Sociology 3171 is a course in “Whiteness Studies” which applies the Marxist concept of “social construction” to race. The concept of “whiteness” is evidently imposed on society (or by society) to oppress other groups. The course includes class sessions devoted to such topics as “Remedial Education for White Folks,” “White American Culture,” “History of Whiteness,” “Is the Social Structure White?” and “Whiteness: The power of privilege.”

Class sessions single out white students: “Whiteness Assignment #1 for White Students (due 10/6):Write an essay interrogating your whiteness identity. The issues you should address.in this essay are: your understanding of race, the role of whiteness in your community and country and how that has impacted you, your socialization into being white in a white dominated culture…” Non-white students have a separate assignment how whiteness has had an impact on them.”

The readings assigned in the course are exclusively from the radical perspective that America is a racist society and that whites dominate all other groups. Readings by academic critics of these views – Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Shelby Steel, John McWhorter, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom – are entirely absent from the course reading list. This is once again a course designed to indoctrinate students in a sectarian theory. It is not scholarly; it is not academic. And it violates the academic freedom of Colorado students.

U.S. VALUES, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, AND CHANGE

Sociology 2031

Professor Sara Steen

Course objectives:

The goal of this course is to prepare you to be a more educated and more active citizen.Throughout the term, we will talk about the relationship between individuals and communities using a sociological perspective. We will use what we learn about social problems to begin to think about possible solutions and to identify specific actions we as individual citizens can take to work toward these solutions.

Readings:

Kozol, Jonathan.Amazing Grace.

Hallinan, Joseph.Going Up the River.

Ehrenreich, Barbara.Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Gettingby in America.

Kingsolver, Barbara.Small Wonder.

This is a frankly political course to recruit students to leftwing activism. While all of the texts are by leftwing critics of American capitalism, none is by a sociologist. Jonathan Kozol is a leftwing educator, Barbara Ehrenreich is a socialist reporter who has written a one-sided book about minimum wage jobs. Joseph Hallinan is a reporter whose book is an attack on privatized prisons, and Barbara Kingsolver is a left-wing novelist. There is no academic agenda in this course, only indoctrination.

This course is designed to introduce you to the sociological study of race and ethnicity. My three main goals this semester are to a) introduce you to different explanations of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States, b) show you how group interaction has contributed to racial and ethnic inequality in the U.S., and c) show you how racial and ethnic inequality in the U.S. have affected group interaction.

The professor teaching this course claims that his first goal in teaching the course is to introduce his students to “different explanations of racial and ethnic inequality in United States.” But an academic course should not presume there is ethnic and racial inequality in the United States; it should inquire as to whether there is. Moreover every text assigned for this course is written by a well-known leftist whose thesis is that the United States is a racist society. Joel Feagin, the author of one of these texts has written: “One can accurately describe the United States as a ‘total racist society’ in which every major aspect of life is shaped to some degree by the core racist realities.”[9] “In the United States, Every part of the life cycle, and most aspects of one’s life, are shaped by the racism that is integral to the foundation of the United States.”[10]

SOCIOLOGY OF RACE AND ETHNICITY Sociology 3015

Instructor Jason D. Boardman Summer Woo

Overview

The primary goal of this course is to introduce students to research within sociological and social demographic research on race and ethnicity. Specific areas will include the following: conceptual/measurement issues; population size, growth, and migration; health and mortality; marriage, family, and fertility; socioeconomic context; and policy considerations. The reading materials in this class, for the most part, will be structured around current empirical pieces in the sociology of race and ethnicity.

3. Maran, Meredith. 2000. Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, a Glimpse into the Heart of a`Nation. St. Martin’s Griffin: New York.

While the course description claims that the primary goal of the course is to “introduce students to research” and that the reading materials in the class “will be structured around … empirical pieces,” the only single-author academic text assigned for the course is by the extremist Joe Feagin, whose conclusions are trumpeted in the propagandistic title of his book: “Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Future Reparations.”

II. WOMEN’S STUDIES

The departmental website for Women’s Studies asks, “What knowledge will I gain with a degree in Women's Studies?” It provides eleven answers to the question among which are these:

• the ways in which ideas of masculinity and femininity shape and interact with other axes of domination, such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and nation;

• the centrality of gender at the local, national and international levels of society, politics and the economy;

• how power and privilege function in relation to the intersection of gender, race, class, sexuality and nation;

• women’s activism and resistance to oppression;

None of these degree goals represent academic values or imply academic knowledge. The idea that “class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and nation” represent “axes of domination” is an ideological perspective of the sectarian left. The idea that gender is central in all areas and all levels of society is an ideological claim. The knowledge of “women’s activism and resistance to oppression” is the statement of a political agenda, not an academic program. Since students are expected to display such knowledge – or prejudice – in order to earn a Women’s Studies degree, this entire department is self-evidently devoted to indoctrination not education.

INTRODUCTION TO FEMINIST STUDIES

Women’s Studies 2000-100

Instructor:Jill Williams

The very title of this course indicates its non-academic nature. Imagine a course titled Introduction to Conservative Studies or Introduction to Monarchist or Introduction to Evangelical Studies.

Course description:

…We will be examining the social construction of knowledge by considering feminist critiques of scientific knowledge.An underlying project of the class will be to address the questions “How do we know what we know?” and “How do our particular positions within the race, class, gender and sexuality systems affect our knowledge?”

Do our particular positions within the race, class gender and sexuality “systems” really affect our scientific knowledge? Is there a black or feminist theory of relativity, or working class theory of gravity? Only for an ideologue. Not surprisingly, the theoretical texts for this course are exclusively texts written by radical feminists.

This foundation course in the Peace and Conflict Studies Certificate Program is designed as an introduction to nonviolent methods and approaches to resolution of conflict.The course provides an intellectual exploration and historical understanding of prominent ideas advanced by nonviolence adherents working actively for social change.

The official description of this course candidly announces the ideological nature of both the course and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, which is designed to indoctrinate students in the anti-military prejudices of its instructors. The rationale for the military in a democracy is the preservation of peace. A commitment to non-violence methods is a religious conviction not an academic perspective. The absence of a professor of military science in this department is prima facie evidence of the ideological character of its curriculum.

IV. BLACK STUDIES

BLACK AMERICA AND THE WAR IN VIETNAM

BlackStudies 4650-30

Professor William King

1. My intent in this course is to provide a view of the War in Vietnam from an Afrocentric perspective.

The above explanation by the instructor indicates the ideological nature of this course. Afro-centrism is a discredited racialist doctrine.[11]There is no justification for an academic course that teaches the history of the Vietnam war from a race-centered point of view.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN AMERICA

Black Studies 4650

Professor William King

Topical Outline of the Course

A.Approaches to the study of the civil rights movement in America.

Because of its character, it is my contention that the Black Civil Rights Movement in America is a kind of domestic war created and sustained by white people (or their surrogates), whose origins may be found in the involuntary transportation of Africans to the New World. War, the dictionary tells us, may be defined as “a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism,” or as “a struggle between opposing forces” to realize a particular end. In this case the black end is the right of self-determination which has been resisted at every turn by those in power who fear a loss of identity whenever black people advance to a place they have not been before.

This course description reveals the tendentious and non-academic agenda of the instructor who ignores the role played by non-Africans, beginning with the American founders who provided the legal and philosophical basis for the civil rights movement, beginning with the Declaration of Independence.

V. LGBT STUDIES

QUEER RHETORICS

Program for Writing and Rhetoric 3020-026

Instructor: Geoffrey Bateman

Course Description

This course presumes that the best way to learn how to write is by writing—by engaging frequently and intensively in the arts of composition.We will do so by immersing ourselves in the exciting ideas of queer theory and lgbtq studies and in the local Boulder lesbian gay transgender queer community, which will provide the context for our practice to become effective and adept writers.Throughout the semester, we will survey a number of different types of queer writing—including history, theory, coming out stories, journalism, political activism, and academic research—and will use this writing to generate thoughtful discussion and analysis of queer rhetorical contexts and to help us develop our own voices as writers.To help us hone our skills as writers and rhetoricians, we will also spend about one-third of our class doing “service-learning.”That is, we will explore the lgbtq communities in Boulder, volunteer time at a few organizations, and develop our own queer service-learning projects.(Please note: you do not have to identify as queer, or as any other such non-normative sexual/gender identity, to take or succeed in this class; you do need to maintain an open mind to the intellectual and critical possibilities of queerness.) Emphasis added.

This course is represented (or mis-represented) as a course in rhetoric, but it is self-evidently a course of indoctrination in “queer politics,” including active volunteer participation in queer organizations. The idea that volunteering in organizations helps to hone skills in writing and rhetoric is transparently absurd. Several other courses listed in this department are clearly about instilling a radical perspective in students and are only tenuously about writing or rhetoric.

…Since this class takes a decidedly feminist and social construction approach to studying LGBT issues, these approaches will be discussed in section one.

In other words, this is not an academic course about lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gendered people, it is an indoctrination in the radical feminist approach to this subject.

Obviously, many University of Colorado Professors consider their classrooms as appropriate arenas for political activism, and confuse scholarship with political advocacy. Here is an excerpt from the departmental biography (and self-description) of one such faculty member who views her mission as “advocacy scholarship, which challenges the claims of objectivity and links research to community concerns and social change.”

Professor Elisa (Linda) Facio

Department of Ethnic Studies

Works by Gloria Anzaldua, Anna Castillo, Emma Perez, and the anthology Building with Our hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, have been most influential in my development as a Chicana sociologist. As racial/ethnic women scholars, I feel our works are attempts to explore our realities and identities (since academic institutions omit, erase, distort and falsify them) and to unbuild and rebuild them. Our writings and scholarship, built on earlier waves of feminism, continue to critique and to directly address dominant culture and "white" feminism. However, our works also attest to the fact that we are now concentrating on our own projects, our own agendas, our own theories, in other words on our own world views. This process is recognized by racial/ethnic scholars as "de colonization of the voice." For others, it is considered unscholarly, unscientific; words of colonization associated with a monocultural society.

Chicana scholarship reveals our struggles as Chicanas in the United States, and expresses in a society which attempts to render us invisible. Historically, Chicana voices have not been chronicled. They have gone largely unnoticed and undocumented. In spite of the academic claims of "value-free inquiry," Chicanas have not been deemed worthy of study. When they have been studied, stereotypes and distortions have prevailed. Yet Chicanas have spoken out around kitchen tables, in factories, labor camps, in community and political organizations, at union meetings. Rooted in the political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, our scholarship, like other currents of dissent is a Chicana critique of cultural, political, and economic conditions in the United States. It is influenced by the tradition of advocacy scholarship, which challenges the claims of objectivity and links research to community concerns and social change. It is driven by a passion to place the Chicana, as speaking subject, at the center of intellectual discourse. (Emphasis added.)

ENDNOTES:

[1] I wish to acknowledge the research help of Tom Ryan in preparing this analysis.

[11] Several books have been written about the travesty of “Afro-centricity,” exposing it as a racist idea based on made-up history. The most famous of critics, Mary Lefkowitz, is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, emeritus, at Wellesley College, was instrumental in bringing women into the leadership of the American Philological Association, the professional association of classical scholars and ancient historians in the United States. In her book Not Out of Africa, Lefkowitz characterizes “Afro-centricty” as the teaching of “myths disguised as history.” Professor Lefkowitz’s summary of these myths is as follows: “There is little or no historical substance to many of the Afro-centrists’ most striking claims about the ancient world. There is no evidence that Socrates, Hannibal, and Cleopatra had African ancestors. There is no archaeological data to support the notion that Egyptians migrated to Greece during the second millennium B.C. (or before that). There is no reason to think that Greek religious practices originated in Egypt…. Other assertions are not merely unscientific; they are false. Democritus could not have copied his philosophy from books stolen from Egypt by Anaxarchus, because he had died many years before Alexander's invasion [of Egypt]. Aristotle could not have stolen his philosophy from books in the library at Alexandria, because the library was not built until [fifty years] after his death. There never was such thing as an Egyptian Mystery System (which is a central part of Afro-centrist teaching).”

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